well known than his main competitor,
Manolo Blahnik. The Very Privé was
Louboutin's iPod, its futuristic contours
rendering everything that came before it
fuddy-duddy. With several swoops of his
pen, he had managed to make Blahnik's
princessy slingbacks look as if they were
meant for ladies who spend their days eat-
ing charity lunches of chicken salad and
melon balls. The Louboutin woman
might order a rare hamburger. "I'll do
shoes for the lady who lunches, but it
would be, like, a really nasty lunch, talk-
ing about men," Louboutin said. "But
where I draw the line, what I absolutely
won't do, is the lady who plays bridge in
the afternoon!"
Self-serious monochrome fashion
people are not Louboutin's target audi-
ence. (Shawna Rose, his head of commu-
nications in New York, refers to them as
"the black-and-camels.") He gives his de-
signs onomatopoeic names, like T outen-
kaboucle, or raunchy ones, like Zigounette
("tiny dick"). Once, he made the straps of
a sandal out of tape measures. Another
time, he put pockets all over a boot, like a
safari jacket, and called it CNN Girl. Oc-
casionally, he goes overboard with the
jokes. For example, he designed a shoe
with a trompe-foeil heel that made its
wearer appear to be standing on a curtain
tassel. "It was a big failure," he recalled.
He believes, anyway, in repelling pre-
ciousness with a sense of humor. "Really
good taste, you have to forget about it,"
he said. 'We have a phrase in French, Ie
petit quelque chose qui fout tout par terre,
which means 'the little thing that fucks
everything up.' So, with a very classical
shape, you use, like, a really funky fabric
or an overshiny thing." In 2006, Loubou-
tin took the basic shape of the Very Privé
and swaddled it in fuzzy orange mo-
hair-a Snuffieupagus of a shoe. Hamish
Bowles, the European editor-at-large for
Vogue, said, "There's the promise of
something wicked in Christian's shoes.
They re a little dangerous, and there's a
sense of teetering on the precipice be-
tween avoiding dreary conventional
good taste and tumbling into something
.c "
lar more outrageous.
Louboutin is well read (Houellebecq,
Oates, Kapuscinski) and widely travelled
(a few years ago, he and Diane von Fur-
stenberg vacationed in Uzbekistan). An
avid horticulturalist, he charmed Cathe-
rine Deneuve at a dinner party by talking
84 THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 28, 2011
with her for hours about a rare species of
peony. But he is also puckish and warm,
with a penchant for vests and bow ties, fe-
doras and fezzes. At heart, he is a show-
guy, and his shoes are miniature stages.
In the midst of a breakfast at a hotel in
Paris, Louboutin was fiddling with his
iPhone. He wanted to make a note of
"pinkie finger," a new phrase he had
learned. ("Sounds a little gross!" he said.)
He touched into his photo gallery, and
flicked to a picture, taken at a café in
Rome, of a freshly prepared latte. Who-
ever had made it had poured the foam
into a heart shape. "I ask the waiter, 'Does
it mean anything?' " Louboutin recalled.
" 'This side or that side?' " He turned the
phone upside down, so that the heart be-
came buttocks. "So I said, 'O.K., I prefer
the second one!' " The carny in Loubou-
tin adores a spectacle, the naughtier the
better. In 2007, he collaborated with
David Lynch on an exhibition of photo-
graphs of naked women wearing ex-
tremely painful-looking shoes. "Some of
the people who came to see it were really
sort of coming out of graves, almost like
vampires," he said. Louboutin does not
begrudge his sadomasochistic constitu-
ency. ''You really need to be a criminal or
a pervert to shock me," he said.
Louboutin told me that he had once
become embroiled in a mystery. He had
been sitting in his office when the phone
rang. It was a police inspector, calling
to say that he had found Louboutin's
card in the handbag of a woman who
had stabbed a man. The inspector and
Louboutin talked for a while. The
woman, it turned out, was a prostitute,
with a history of insanity. After Loubou-
tin convinced the policeman that he was
but a coincidental contact-the card was
from one of his boutiques-he put down
the receiver and started sketching. "I was
trying to imagine exactly the type of shoe
the type of girl who would be in that sit-
uation would have," he said. "So I ended
up doing a shoe that is, like, a high heel
with a point and a detachable sling strap,
which can be usefW if she wants to knock
somebody." The shoe was gold and
strappy. He called it Murderess.
C hristian Louboutin is to Rue Jean-
Jacques Rousseau what Marc Jacobs
is to Bleecker Street-the sovereign of an
urban fiefdom, expanding in concert
with his company's fortunes. Louboutin
opened his first shop at the end of1991,
in the Galérie Vero- Dodat, a skylit ar-
cade that connects Rue Jean-Jacques
Rousseau to Rue Croix-des-Petits-
Champs. The arcade, populated largely
by moribund antique shops, was often
deserted. Louboutin took a few laps
through the area every day, in the hope
of creating an illusion of activity. Today,
Louboutin has thirty-five stores in six-
teen countries. He has annexed half of
Rue Jean-Jacques Rousseau to comprise
what the painter Konstantin Kakanias, a
longtime friend, has called "a byzantine
labyrinth or, rather, a casbah of offices,
design studios, and storage rooms."
Louboutin often administers to the col-
ony from afar: a recent itinerary included
stops in Geneva (work), Havana (fun),
Miami (fun), and Rio de Janeiro (work
and fun), with a few days in Paris before
he continued on to Milan, New Delhi,
Mumbai, and Shanghai (mostly work).
Rue Jean-Jacques Rousseau is a Fleet
Street or a Madison Avenue, dedicated
to the perfection of a single craft. Em-
ployees stream up and down the pave-
ment, identifiable by their extremities.
Their soles are like tail-lights: red on the
way back
When Louboutin is in town, a festive
air prevails. He pops in and out of door-
ways, dodging buses and darting into
shortcuts and passageways-industry as
an Advent calendar. In early March, he
had just got back from Brazil, where he
and Hugo Marchand, his studio direc-
tor, had gone to work on the summer
collection for next year. Louboutin, who
is forty-seven, had come to the office
straight from the airport. He was wear-
ing brown moleskin pants, a green car-
digan sweater, and a plaid shirt with
some sort of plant life on the placket. In
gold-rimmed spectacles, he appeared the
archetypal bootmaker. (He had lost a
more fashionable plastic pair in Brazil.)
His head, bald and browned, bore a faint
pink welt. "The wave jumped on me and
banged me!" he said. "I was like an os-
trich, my head in the sand."
Louboutin was sitting in the central
room of his design offices, in a two-story
building that one enters through a court-
yard hidden from the street. The second
floor has a peaked glass root: like a green-
house. Hanging from the ceiling was
a glittering Spanish galleon, accompa-
nied by a pair of chandeliers decked with